Women, feminism, and geek culture

Kathryn Cramer Is Oppressed!

Nick Mamatas is always trying to get me to start some shit so he sent over this link to Kathryn Cramer’s blog*. Normally I would ignore this crazy person, but I figure many others are going to comment on this or may already have, so I’ll throw in my 2 cents.

For those of you unaware, Kathryn Cramer is an editor who does an annual year’s best with her husband, David Hartwell, and also works on the New York Review of Science Fiction. Her role in the online discussion/debate known as RaceFail came at the tail end of everything when she decided that it was very, very, very important for everyone to know the real name behind the screen name of a blogger who used to work for the publishing company that puts out the aforementioned year’s best. Once people objected to this pointless outing, she continued to link the fan/screen name to this person’s real name and spread wank across as many sites on the Internet as she could. This behavior is of a piece with her other online and offline antics in the past year and over the course of decades. She comes off as a bit imbalanced, as the blog post I pointed to will attest.

Cramer is apparently bored or something because she’s decided to stir the fires of RaceFail again. This time she’s proposing a panel for WisCon (a convention she no longer attends because of its “encouragement of Fail fandom”) called “More Oppressed than Thou.” Because, don’t you know, there are two kinds of oppressed people: those who have actually been beaten up by cops and those who only have a theoretical understanding of their oppression. You think I am kidding but I am not.

I’m sure that I, a black woman living in America, have never, ever experienced oppression. Oh no. But I read about it in a book and that makes me all self-righteous and stuff.

I know the answer to this, but I can’t help asking why it is that people like Cramer are always the ones to start up the Oppression Olympics. Next she’ll be whining about how her Irish ancestors couldn’t get a job or something.

You would think that attitudes like Cramer’s wouldn’t even require a response because they’re so ridiculolus. However, going by reports I’ve heard about a certain other convention* that I know Cramer and those who agree with her view of RaceFail attend, I know that we can’t just trust that right-thinking people won’t be taken in by this nonsense.

If someone really, really needs me to explain why her position is a load of horseshit I will.

* I did not anonymize the link because I don’t care if she knows I’m talking about her. If you’re clicking from your FList and don’t want to even have your screenname show up on her stats, use this link.

5 thoughts on “Kathryn Cramer Is Oppressed!”

I can’t even bring myself to follow your link, since it’s going to be full of willful misrepresentation of other people’s posts (without links thus placing them out of context), aggressive cluelessness, paranoid conviction of victimhood, failure of perspective, refusal to acknowledge the existence of white/het/cis/abled privilege, and namedropping. Hell with that.

I do hope the Wiscon ProgComm will recognize the spirit in which her suggestion is offered — in which case, it’ll be roundfiled or rewritten to be worthwhile.